Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs, 2020) (Patreon)

This is a difficult film to evaluate. It's the latest in a recent spate of auto-portraits of filmmakers and their families, and obviously one of the difficulties with these projects is that the filmmaker is ensnared within their own narrative. This is theoretically "correct," in terms of the post-structuralist critiques of objectivity in fields like sociology and ethnography. If we understand the dangers of objectifying an Other, it seems that there's no better way to circumvent this trap by turning the camera on one's own "tribe."

But as with Robb Moss's The Same River Twice, Kirsten Johnson's Dick Johnson is Dead or Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell, Film About a Father Who often fails to make allowances for the viewer, who does not share the inherent emotional connection to the material at hand. Johnson probably tackled the problem the best, since her father was a willing creative accomplice and the subsequent film combined painful familial considerations with cinematic whimsy. But Sachs' film operates very much like the Polley film in that it tries to use the uncovering of family secrets as a kind of suspense structure, or at least a narrative thread. But discovering that one's parents are deceitful, or even just not very good people, can never be as earth-shattering (or interesting) for the viewer as it is for the maker.

To my mind, Film About a Father Who demonstrates this problem more acutely than other films in the genre. For us to be really compelled by the sordid actions of Ira Sachs, Sr., we'd have to already love him. He'd have to be our father, a patriarch whose very presence or absence in the family circle demands that we have conflicted feelings about him. As Sachs' film shows, he was kind of an asshole, a playboy who liked to sire children everywhere he went but wasn't incredibly interested in behaving like a father to those kids. 

I'm not just saying that he's an unsympathetic lead character, although that's certainly true. My real point is, the secrets Sachs unearths while making the film aren't as painful or disturbing for the viewer as they are for Lynne and the other Sachs siblings. In making a statement like this, I'm of course butting up against Ebert's "empathy machine" thesis. Why don't I care about these people, or identify with them in some way? I suppose it's because (to borrow a Siskelism) watching families torn apart by selfish behavior is not much different than watching the same family eating dinner together, over and over again. What makes this special? 

It seems to me that successful family-autopsy films, like Capturing the Friedmans (made by an outsider), Sink of Swim (which triangulates its family history through heightened formalism), or Strong Island (a film with a hate crime at its center) use blood relations as a jumping-off point, showing that the family is a social organism that interfaces with the outside world. Could it be that, in isolation, all unhappy families are actually the same?